Doug Jones says campaign won't focus on Roy Moore allegations

Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Doug Jones said Tuesday he's not making the sexual misconduct allegations against Roy Moore a focus of his campaign, adding that he believed Moore was unqualified for office before the claims first surfaced last week.

"I know we've been working hard, we've been moving, we've been still talking about issues. I know there are other things going on around here in this state, but we're four weeks - 28 days - from this election that's going to decide which direction Alabama takes, whether we'll go forward or backwards," Jones told reporters near Bartow Arena in Birmingham. "That's the way I see it, the way I've always seen it. Nothing in the last four or five days is going to change that. This is issues about the people of Alabama, and what they want to see headed into the 21st century, and what kind of state we want to portray ourselves as."

Earlier Tuesday, the Jones campaign aired an ad featuring seven Republicans who said they would be voting for Jones in the Dec. 12 special election. One of the voters says in the ad, "You read the story and it just shakes you," an apparent reference to the Washington Post story from last Thursday detailing some of the allegations.

While Jones conceded that that portion of the ad was about the claims, he said the other Republicans in the ad were speaking generally about Moore's character.

"Those folks were in our camp long before any of this happened," he said. "The focus of that ad, there's one part about [the allegations], but the rest of it is just about him and his record, which is not a good record for the people of the state of Alabama."

But Jones said he would focus on the issues of the campaign and not the scandal that has engulfed Moore.

"We have said all along that Roy Moore is not qualified to be a United States senator. He's been kicked out of office twice," Jones said. "We're going to stay in our lane. And we're going to continue to talk about the issues that we continue to talk about. [The voters are] going to have to make their own judgments about Roy Moore, they're going to have to make their own judgments about Doug Jones."